Landscape in Motion: Edmund Finnis on Sound, Scale, and Time

At the end of last month, I travelled to Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall for the UK premiere of The Landscape Wakes, the final work in British composer Edmund Finnis’s orchestral trilogy, commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic. The piece received its world premiere last year by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and the Manchester performance marked its first UK outing, following earlier performances of Finnis’s orchestral music by the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

On the afternoon of the performance, we met high up in the hall, by a floor-to-ceiling window. Outside, trams passed intermittently, their low-frequency vibrations travelling through the glass and into the floor beneath our feet. Otherwise, there was only the quiet, steady current of Finnis’s thought - measured, continuous, and spreading through the empty bar space.

Raised in Oxford, Finnis studied composition with Julian Anderson. His debut album The Air, Turning (2019) received the premiere award from BBC Music Magazine, establishing his presence within the contemporary British music scene. His works have been released on labels including Decca Records, NMC Recordings, and LSO Live, and have also appeared in the soundtrack to the film A White, White Day. Since 2015, he has taught at the Royal Academy of Music.

In recent years, Finnis has increasingly drawn attention in the UK for a practice grounded in long-term collaboration with performers. Through familiarity and sustained exchange, his music often grows out of specific individuals. From a set of piano miniatures written for Víkingur Ólafsson, to a recent cello concerto composed for Sheku Kanneh-Mason, his understanding of composition extends beyond craft and structure toward something more direct, more human in tone.

At the same time, his approach to notation avoids excessive precision, leaving space for performers’ instinct and judgement. He keeps a certain distance from the long-standing hierarchies of taste in contemporary music, as well as its suspicion of sentimentality. Rather than systems or methods, he is drawn to composers whose voices are immediately recognisable - figures such as György Ligeti, Morton Feldman, and Arvo Pärt - music that engages not only the intellect, but also the inner life.

This conversation was also recorded for the podcast London Ears, as part of its new “The Riff Residency” series. It is available on platforms including Apple Podcast.

Edmund Finnis in Manchester. Photo: Lucy Cheung

A Dialogue with Edmund Finnis

EF=Edmund Finnis

LC=Lucy Cheung

EF: Over the last few years I’ve made a concerted effort to try and make plans to record pieces soon after, or quite soon after they’re first realized. Because I sort of think of that as being another important part of the process of just sharing the music. I mean it’s an obvious thing to say really, but I like the idea of just being able to be there for the first recording. And that in a way, I think of that as part of the work of making the piece as well. To be able to get the sound right, to get the feeling of it right, you know, in a particular space. The production of it, all of these things. Even, you know, if I can, where I can, where I can be involved with the artwork. So that all of these aspects that feed into how people receive the work, I find that really fun to work on and it’s really important to me.

LC: Do you often compose for specific people? You play both piano and cello yourself - how do those collaborations come about? For instance, Youth was written for a pianist as well?

EF: Yeah, so Youth is for Claire Hammond, and I’ve known her for a long time, and then these pieces that we were talking about before, Mirror Images for Víkingur Ólafsson, similarly someone that I’ve - we’ve known one another for quite a while, and we were talking about this piece for a long time, same with Youth for Claire, and I find it really helpful to know well the person that I’m writing for, to know their kind of musical personality, I want to say, but also just who they are as people, and that somehow feeds into how you’re dreaming up the music, I think, not necessarily in a kind of easily describable way.

But then the most recent instance I’ve had of that was working closely with Sheku Kanneh-Mason on this cello concerto that I wrote, well it was premiered last year, I wrote it the year prior to that, and that came out of some short pieces for solo cello, exactly, and with the preludes I was able to work closely with Sheku on phrasing, and how I like to work with dynamics, like sometimes very quick sudden shifts of dynamics, things to do with the sorts of sonorities that I love on the cello, because I grew up playing the cello, well first I tried playing the violin, but I was terrible at it, and I think my violin teacher even suggested that I try out a cello, and as soon as I played the low C string, the lowest string on the instrument, I just was immediately drawn to that richness, and that roundness of sonority.

And so all of these things, they’re in the background when I’m writing, I try to, where I can, play through the cello parts of orchestral pieces that I’m writing, and I compose at the piano a lot, and also when I compose I sing a lot, I used to sing in a choir, and in Oxford, yeah, in New College Choir, and that was an incredible early, quite intense education I think, and I haven’t written a huge amount of choral music actually, I hope to do more in the future, but just more generally, the connection to voice and breath is very important, I find in my music, you know, even when - so when I’m writing like this orchestral piece today, I’m trying to sing and play through as much of it as I can to get a sense of what it’s like for the musicians to, as it were, sort of embody and project this music outwards, and that’s really important to me, that it’s sort of rewarding for them as well, because the musicians are the people who bring it to life.

Edmund Finnis © Venetia Jollands

LC: Was it true that when you first heard Sheku playing in the rehearsal prelude that you felt that he immediately understood the sound you wanted to create, and did that being understood affect the direction you composed afterwards?

EF: Definitely, because what it meant was that I felt that I could completely trust him to realise the musical ideas that I was coming up with, and so I, in writing that piece, I gave myself quite a lot of time, because it was the sort of largest scale piece I’ve written so far, also obviously just a wonderful opportunity in itself, and I really tried to make it the most direct expression that I could.

And so - and I try to also, when I’m writing, it’s not just for me like a cerebral intellectual pursuit, I want it to engage people’s hearts as well as their minds, and I want to write expressive music. I think that there’s something that makes me write music which is to do with communication of things which are non-verbal, communicating something about being alive, something about the wonder of life, its sorrows, but also its joys, and the sort of struggles, but also the sort of hope. I want these things which, you know, they affect all of us as human beings to, not in an explicit way, but I want them to feed into how I’m making the music, and how I’m imagining it, and so, yeah, that’s - I want it to be as human as possible.

LC: Would you say singing in the choir was your earliest important musical experience?

EF: Yeah, definitely. Well, maybe not the earliest. I have older siblings, they played instruments, and we were borrowing a nice piano, so having - hearing my older sister play the piano was probably the earliest musical memory for me, but then I joined this choir when I was seven or eight years old. We were singing Evensong five times a week, maybe more than those services. The experience of, for example, every - leading up to Easter, we would do the Bach Passions. I would say singing Saint John Passion in particular, it was clear to me around that time that I just thought I want to be doing things in music, you know, this is more meaningful, this is where I want to be, this is what I want to do. I didn’t know at that point in what way, but to be involved in music.

LC: When did you decide to compose?

EF: I sort of tried things when I was in my teens. I wrote, for example, a string orchestra piece when I was a teenager, which was quite heavily influenced by the first time I heard Ligeti’s music. That made a big impression on me, and I think that definitely made its mark on this early teenage attempt, but also as a teenager, I started a band with kind of like-minded friends at school. I found the music room at school a bit of a refuge from aspects of school life that I didn’t really enjoy, and I think my friends did as well.

So we started this group, and we were always trying to sort of introduce new music to one another, so I felt like I learned a lot of things, not just about contemporary classical music, but also about rock and electronic music at that point, and I think that those things all kind of, yeah, they all fed into, you know, my musical imagination, and now I just, I love writing for voices, for instruments. I’m not saying I’ll never do anything with electronics again at all, but for me at the moment, that’s what I’m most excited about. Again, it’s to do with that human interaction thing, and the sort of not being mediated by something else, kind of coming through a speaker or something.

Not so early on, but I just remember one of the best musical experiences I’ve had was listening to Isabelle Faust play Bach’s solo violin in Berlin quite a long time ago, but I just thought, this is perfection, really. It’s just one person, one instrument, and that kind of possibility of really direct human expression. It’s a very, very powerful thing.

LC: Talking about listening, one of your interviews mentioned something earlier, you like listening to a few composers, but they were regarded as of lesser value. There's a lot of intellectual pressure in music circles to avoid being too sentimental, I wonder, how do you view this kind of musical snobbery? Is that hierarchy ever a source of frustration or doubt during your development?

EF: I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I did feel a certain pressure when I was an undergraduate, definitely, and I was kind of exposed to a lot more music from the 20th century. There are things that I’m interested in more than I love them. There are some kind of compositional ideas from the 20th century which I find have a kind of potency, and I can see absolutely the appeal of them, and maybe in kind of indirect ways they have influenced me as well.

But more than any kind of dogmatic idea to do with systems and being able to give a complete account of the rational thoughts that have led to a piece of music, I’m really interested in the kind of personalities that come out. For example, I mentioned Ligeti. I love Feldman’s music. I love, obviously, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and these people for whom you can just sort of tell it’s them straight away when you’re listening. And so more than - I love Arvo Pärt, and there’s a lot that one could say about the systems behind his music, but more than that, it’s the sense of the person behind that being able to communicate with real clarity. And all of those composers I’ve mentioned, it does that thing of engages not just the head but the heart as well.

(EF thinking and the conversation paused for a while)

LC: Is there anything else?

EF: Well, you said something about the sort of snobbery about sentimentality and things. Yeah, I certainly recognise that. I will say I think that that is less of an issue now than it was maybe in previous decades. I think that those kinds of ideas or the sense that there’s sort of one right way of doing things or one kind of acceptable way of doing things within conservatories or something like that, I think that that’s really being broken down more and more. And I think that’s a positive thing because I’ve been teaching about 10 years at the Royal Academy of Music and one does still encounter people thinking that there’s a certain kind of right way of doing things and that even if it’s not what they actually want to be doing.

So a lot of the time I’m kind of asking the question, what do you love? What are you drawn to? What are you inspired by? What do you want to make that maybe feels particular to your own tastes and ideas? But I, for myself, just not bothered by it. If people find my music too sentimental or something like that, that wouldn’t trouble me at all. I’m trying to just be honest to myself.

LC: Piano or cello - which is really your instrument?

EF: Well, these days I play the piano a lot more because I write at the piano. But when I was really focussing more on performance in my teenage years, I was probably a better cellist than a pianist.

LC: When I listened to your solo pieces, I could hear traces of Bach. Does your experience as a cellist shape your musical voice?

EF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Those kind of sprung rhythms and things. Yeah, absolutely. I think - sorry, I’m just trying to think about how to answer that.

I guess it’s also the elements of historical tradition. Yeah. I want to be - I don’t believe in a kind of year zero mentality where you’d sort of try and pretend that you could block out history. I love thinking about it like there’s just such this wealth of incredible music that’s been made and it’s part of all of our lives and it’s sort of - it’s in our minds.

And of course, when I’m writing, I sometimes think of it as almost like trying to play a trick with myself, but I want to know as much music as I can. But at the same time, when I’m writing to sort of not think about that, inevitably certain things come out and, you know, maybe from move from one chord to the next, might have a reminiscence of something in the past. And that’s okay with me because I try to find my own way with these colours and sounds.

And I think gesture is really important. And you mentioned a gesture in that piece for solo cello, but if it has elements of it, which echo Bach, that’s fine with me. And that is because it’s music that I adore, you know, and absolutely, I suppose in the case of the cello, especially that I played a lot. Yeah. But I’m interested in trying to sort of find my own way with these kinds of shapes.

There are inevitably going to be - again, to say that thing about like importance of breath. I think that that’s something that’s so wonderful in Bach’s music, the sense of kind of line and contour that seems there’s something very natural about it, I think. In my own way, I think I’m aiming for something which has a kind of naturalness. It’s hard to put into words, but when I’m working on things, there’s a lot of trial and error, but eventually what I’m working towards is this sense of, yes, this is the right note, this is the right harmony, this is the right pacing. You’re kind of making many thousands of those kinds of decisions on a micro level all the time when you’re composing.

Edmund Finnis © Venetia Jollands

LC: You tend to use descriptive language rather than precise mechanical markings in your scores. Does it represent a trust in the performer's intuition?

EF: Absolutely, yeah. So this piece that we’ve been working on in Manchester the last few days, The Landscape Wakes, one of the things that we were talking about just in rehearsal yesterday was to do with dynamics and how sometimes I’ve written in a crescendo getting louder and then a diminuendo getting quieter, but I haven’t necessarily marked in what the arrival volume dynamic level should be all the time. I could have gone into more analytical depth of prescribing exactly this at this moment and so on, but what I was saying to the musicians is that we can just feel this more organically, that from this point in the piece to this point in the piece, the overall sense is that it is growing, it is proliferating, it is getting louder, it’s getting more sonorous, and that I don’t want to necessarily over-prescribe that. I want it to also, as you said, leave things to the extraordinary skill and judgement and musicality of the people that I’m writing for.

LC: Do these words go directly to a performer’s emotional memory? And where do you draw the line between poetic freedom and technical control?

EF: I don’t draw a line because I think that they are completely intertwined and interwoven and I think that that sense of the amount of work that all of those orchestral musicians have put into honing their craft is also inextricably linked to their development of their own musical personalities and that’s when I’m writing in a different kind of way.

It’s a similar thing. I’m very interested in the craft of composing and trying to find the right notes, the right way of putting them on paper, the right sort of sense of flow and how to build larger scales of music. This is something that I’m really thinking about a lot at the moment. So all of those things, you could sort of say there are technical aspects to that which take time to learn and develop one’s way with and they are also completely tied up with the emotional side, what you said about the poetic side.

The great poets were also great masters of language and the discipline of rhythm, of structure, where the stress lies, where the stress falls and these things. So to continue with that analogy for a moment, you know that poems that have a direct, that sort of really speak to you, you might not be aware of necessarily all the technical aspects of what makes that poem so powerful and it might sort of speak to you in a more emotional way. Nevertheless, both of those things are operating.

LC: Some people would say that’s even more sophisticated - when technique is hidden.

EF: You mean if it’s kind of buried or if it’s subconscious? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.

LC: You often reference visual artists. Do you ever “see” music, in a synesthetic sense?

EF: No, I don’t. I don’t have that at all. No, it’s a fascinating thing. I don’t have that, but I’m interested in the analogies and I think I said this before, but about certain visual artists giving me a sense of kind of courage and freedom to do what I wanted to do.

And I think there was a certain point, you know, I was talking about maybe like pressures to be writing a certain kind of music when I was in my undergraduate studies, but it was actually not necessarily from other music but from looking at Agnes Martin’s paintings. I remember seeing a room of her paintings in New York and just absolutely loving the experience of looking at them and thinking about them and perceiving them and sort of engaging with the tiny fluctuations in detail and the understatement, I suppose, on the one hand, but understatement that cumulatively builds up to a very, very strong impression. It made a very strong impression on me.

And I think something about that work, that strength of voice and again to say it’s about a person behind that, a personality that’s kind of forging ahead with these decisions all the time, I think it gave me a certain confidence to do away with those things, those aspects of what I was writing that I felt were either unnecessary or not necessarily honest to what I really love and what I wanted to hear and maybe there were kind of other voices in my head saying like, you know, this is the way you should be going and writing and actually just to just be able to really block that out and have some more clarity, like daylight.

LC: Do visual ideas ever translate directly into your music - for example colour theory into harmony?

EF: Never as direct as that but in more general terms, a sense of spaciousness from, for example, Agnes Martin’s work or there’s that piece in the piano pieces called Youth, which is called Frankenthaler and again that was just thinking about the atmosphere of, as it were, the atmosphere of some of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings. A sense of what the paint is doing, how it’s kind of saturating into the canvas, this kind of very wet paint that’s sort of soaking into the canvas and I remember just thinking I want to write something with a lot of pedal down and that each note is like a kind of colour, as it were, you know, resonating onwards in a way that it’s not, of course, it’s not a sort of direct link but in the mind, you know, the mind can kind of make these connections and I’d never want to be sort of didactic or try to, in a contrived way, say that there’s a sort of direct link but just the naming of that piece after this artist is just a nod to that and a sort of homage to it, I think.

LC: Let’s talk about the orchestral trilogy - this evening’s piece is the last one.

EF: That’s right, yeah, so I’m very excited because it’s the third piece in this trilogy about how we perceive the natural world around us and the first one was written for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and that was The Air Turning and the second one is called Acts of Waves, about the experience of force of water, its motion, and this one is called The Landscape Wakes.

And with this one I had in my mind this image of the world’s constant rotating on its axis, the constant sense that it’s dawning, so it’s - the landscape in the title is not any particular landscape, it’s not a particular place, absolutely not, it’s in fact it’s any landscape, it’s any - but the point that I was thinking about was this sense of not just the rotating on the earth, rotating on its axis, but also revolving around the sun, so it’s to do with cycles and I think more than that is to do with sort of the idea of endurance and things coming into light and then into darkness and light again, the course of a day, the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of generations, this sort of different scales of time and that word scale is really the important thing with this set of three orchestral pieces.

I find that when I’m thinking about writing for orchestra, first thing I’m thinking about is the scale of it. I’m very pleased that you said this, when you listen to The Air Turning, sort of things moving across the space of the orchestra, I love the idea of the space of an orchestra, the physical space and the people within it and the idea that there’s this possibility of moving sounds across this space in a vast array of different permutations that you can make within the orchestral palette as it were, so yeah I get a real thrill from writing for orchestra because of this sense of kind of possibility of playing with scale and sometimes drawing things in very, very intimate, just a few instruments playing very, very quietly or a sound I absolutely adore is a whole string section just playing as quietly as possible, so it's a sense of the contrast or the friction between a sound that's very quiet in terms of decibel levels but it still has this kind of quiet strength or presence because it's being made by so many people, so many instruments.

LC： Yeah, I can see Arvo Pärt's influence coming in there.

EF: Yeah, yeah, yeah I see what you mean, definitely, yeah but with this new piece what I've really tried to do more than ever before is to create a sense of harmonic motion that is really ongoing, that is really, it's sort of never resting, there's always and it's one of the things that I've sort of enjoyed that we've been, that I've talked a little bit about in the rehearsal is this, everyone's lines within the orchestral fabric so to speak, they're always very slowly or very quickly rising or falling or getting louder and then getting quieter, you know, there's always some kind of evolution in the sound and sometimes it happens, as I say, in a very kind of discrete short amount of time and other times there's sort of larger blocks that are also expressing these other shapes in different scales, so the possibility of, yeah, playing with different senses of time, different kinds of movement across this space, it's just, I feel like I'm just getting started with it really, I absolutely, I absolutely love orchestral music at the moment.

LC: How did the connections develop between the three pieces? Did you start off writing them as trilogy?

EF: I didn’t think of it, no, I know, it was only after the first piece that I thought that I want to continue this, the first piece is about, it’s under 10 minutes long and I thought I want to build on this, I think there’s more scope for this idea and my hope and what I’m trying to plan at the moment is a recording of all three of them as an album and that’s, to go back to what I was saying at the beginning, the importance of recording for me, you know, that these pieces, of course they can exist in their own right, but I, since writing the second and the third, have absolutely had it in mind that they could be performed and or recorded as a set of three, so this one, when I was writing it, I was very conscious of, it needs to be a piece in its own right, but it also needs to feel like a culmination of this span of work.

Edmund Finnis © Mike Skelton

LC: Then the next question is actually about electronic music, the piece of music released more than 10 years ago now, Trouble, written for Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.

EF: Oh yeah, yeah, this is completely my friend's project, and it's just something that, well, look, Orlando, I've known him all my life, his mother is my godmother, so we were always friends growing up, and he had this project. This is similar to what I was saying before about school friends just having shared interests, and we just, it was a lot of fun just to contribute in some ways, because he was at the time writing that in a garage, and I used to just go around and have fun plugging in guitars and synthesisers and just coming up with things, and there's something I really like about kind of recording things straight away and then playing them back and adding different layers, building things up. It was really, I think the main thing for me with that was a sense of joy and playfulness with music, playfulness with sound, and the thing that I do love about electronic sort of possibilities is this sort of sense that sound is something that's very tactile and plastic and you can move it around and stretch it and kind of contort it, and I think that in some kind of general ways that that approach to sound itself is something that has fed into my instrumental writing, the way that you can, as it were, sculpt it, I think that my sense of that malleability of sound definitely is informed by playing with synthesisers, with different kinds of music production.

LC: There's a clear aesthetic kinship between you and Jonny Greenwood in music. I wonder if there will be any direct collaboration in the foreseeable future?

EF: I really admire Jonny hugely and his soundtracks, but also I love Radiohead's music and I love the things that he's doing with The Smile and the other projects he has on, yeah, he's wonderful. Yeah, but we have no plans, no, there are no plans for anything.

LC: Do you know each other?

EF: Oh, very slightly.

LC: And finally - if someone is encountering your music for the first time, what would you recommend?

EF: Probably because we were just speaking about it, but The Air, Turning.

LC: Why that one?

EF: I think it deals with a lot of these kinds of concerns that I was thinking about, about space, scale, sounds moving across space.

LC: Has there been a recent work of art that has stayed with you?

EF: A film that I’ve gone back to a few times is Mirror by Tarkovsky. Because of the sense of freedom within cinema, that there’s not just one way that a film can be put together, and I find that a particularly compelling thing to go back to, and some of the images in it, some of the sort of startling uses of editing, and it’s just so, some of the shots are just so beautiful and could only be done with cinema, I absolutely adore that. I also love the music in it.